Comic-Con International sold out all available badges for its July convention in a record seven hours on Saturday, leaving many disappointed fans angry and frustrated.

While the one- and four-day badges typically are sold out by July, all the tickets are not normally bought up in a single day. Last year, Comic-Con sold out in two months, according to TicketLeap, which oversaw Saturday's online sale.

Organizers won't say how many badges were sold, but the pop culture extravaganza typically draws more than 125,000 attendees. Saturday's sale followed two unsuccessful efforts in November to sell Comic-Con tickets, leading to a test sale a month later of 1,000 badges.

The registration site on Saturday morning was overwhelmed with as many as 403,000 page requests a minute, leading to many "over capacity messages, according to TicketLeap.

"We're really sorry to everyone not able to purchase tickets," said Lauren Beley, marketing manager for TicketLeap. "I don't think anyone expected we'd receive as many page requests as we did. Thirty-five million in a day is a crazy amount.

"We prepared and did a lot of tests for a very large number, but this was more than anyone anticipated."

Online purchasers, however, wondered how TicketLeap could not have known the deluge they would face once ticket sales began.

Because of all the confusion and overloaded servers on Saturday, TicketLeap said it would be resending e-mail confirmations on Monday to ticket purchasers to make sure their orders are accurate.

It's possible, said Beley, that some people may have mistakenly ordered more tickets than they wanted, which may mean some badges could be released at a later date.

Comic-Con organizers say refunds are typically processed each year as buyers change their minds or simply are unable to go. They advise those who still want to purchase a badge to regularly visit the Comic-Con website to see when more become available.

Comic-Con spokesman David Glanzer said he's not sure why tickets were exhausted so much more quickly than a year ago but suspects the increased use of social media and blogging, as well as media reports about the unsuccessful sales efforts, heightened interest in the convention.

While organizers acknowledge they cannot accommodate everyone who wants to attend, Glanzer said the process for gaining admission should not have to be so time-consuming for the fans.

"Our frustration no doubt pales compared to theirs, and we're pretty frustrated," said Glanzer, noting that the organization is reviewing what went wrong Saturday. "It wasn't a success by any measure even if we did exhaust all tickets. We truly are sorry for the fiasco and are working to find out exactly what happened and why.

We did accomplish what we couldn't do the first two times, which is sell the show, but you shouldn't have to experience the hours upon hours it took to complete the transactions."